Summary

Our Score

Right, let’s deal immediately with the rather sizeable elephant squatting slap bang in the middle of the room. For yes: Loewe’s 40in Individual 40 Compose costs £3,550. As a starting price.

The model we tested also had attached to it Loewe’s matching Sound Projector 7.1 speaker bar, costing a further £1,450. And it sat gracefully on a delightful chrome floorstand costing another £545.

All of this will immediately price it beyond the wildest dreams of many of our readers. And it will likely also stir into a frenzy the portion of our readership that apparently flat denies the right of any product to be expensive.

But this is actually the last time we’re going to mention the set’s price in this review. For the bottom line is that the Individual 40 Compose is a uniquely stylish, fearsomely specified and above all startlingly good TV that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t made for the ‘money’s no object’ crowd. It’s out to be a high-end BMW or even a Porsche for the TV world. And we personally don’t see anything wrong with that. On the contrary, it would surely be a very grey and boring old TV world if you didn’t have a brand or two wanting to deliver a completely different kind of TV experience.

The design of the Individual 40 Compose configuration we tested really is spectacular. Our model came dressed in high-gloss white, with the white finish running along the top and bottom edges of the screen’s bezel, and all over the TV’s ultra-slim rear. The 7.1-channel sound projector fixed beneath the screen also sports a white grille, with white trim and white rear. As for the pole-style floor stand, it’s a gleaming vision in chrome, and can hide all your cabling up its centre.

Then there are the shiny aluminium silver panels down the sides of both the TV and the sound projector. These are very pretty, but if they’re not to your tastes they can easily be swapped out for different panels in chrome, ribbed chrome, Chrome Microstructure, ebony, light oak, high gloss black... or pretty much any colour you fancy, actually.

The TV can come in Aluminium Black or Aluminium Silver finishes as well as the white, meanwhile. And it can be mounted on all manner of different stand options, including some genuine ‘furniture’ designs. And it can come with a series of different speaker options, including a slimmer speaker bar than the Sound Projector we’re testing, and full matching 5.1 systems. And you can even decide to some extent what level of internal specification and features you want your Individual 40 Compose to have.

Add to all this a super-slim, edge-LED driven screen profile and a build quality that really is second to none and the Individual 40 Compose represents 360-degree design at its best, with peerless bespoke flexibility thrown in for good measure.

You only have to start thinking about the enormous logistical effort required to support all the Individual 40 Compose’s various design and feature options to appreciate just why such products don’t come cheap. And yes, we know we weren’t going to mention price again. But, well...

The Loewe’s connections are inevitably complicated by the fact that it has to accommodate numerous audio and stand options, and even potential integration within a Loewe multi-room system. But focussing on the only stuff that really matters given that anyone buying a Loewe TV/AV system will have it installed for them, we find the Individual 40 Compose’s main chassis carrying a satisfying three HDMIs, an Ethernet port, two USBs, and a PC input.